10/30/2009 @ 6:00PM

Health Care Gets Hip And Smart

If there was a mantra at the TEDMED conference these past few days, Ann Wojcicki, co-founder of consumer genetics company 23andMe, summed it up: “I want better health care and I want it now!”

Several hundred health care visionaries, tech executives, doctors and others came together at the Hotel del Coronado near San Diego to hear about wireless band-aids, edible computer chips, the first appendectomy done without an incision and Dean Kamen’s smart prosthetic robot arm, among other innovations.

TEDMED is put on by Richard Saul Wurman, an author and founder of the TED (“technology, entertainment and design”) conference, which he sold about seven years ago; and Marc Hodosh, an inventor and chairman of the FIRST Robotics competition in Boston.

Some of the technology being developed for better health care includes expensive machines such as genome sequencers that research labs and drug companies use in the early stages of drug development. Life Technologies Chief Executive Greg Lucier, whose company makes such machines, says it recently cost $10,000 to sequence his own genome using one of his company’s machines–but that cost will eventually drop to $1,000.

Other technologies work off ever-more ubiquitous smart phones.
Qualcomm
Chief Paul Jacobs, whose company makes the chips that go inside mobile phones, spoke of a future in which patients with chronic diseases such as congestive heart failure will wear a wireless band aid containing a sensor that measures things such as heart rate, blood pressure and amount of oxygen in the blood. The band aid can wirelessly transmit this information to a smart phone and from there to your doctor or other health care professionals. The idea is to reduce hospitalizations by intervening earlier on to address health problems.

Colin Angle, chief executive of
iRobot
–which makes the Roomba vacuum cleaner robot as well as robots that seek out bombs for the U.S. military–announced that his company is beginning to design robots that could help care for elderly patients in the home–bringing them medicines, for example.

And Andrew Thompson, co-founder of Proteus Biomedical, described a computer chip made from food that can be swallowed and transmit information about whether you’ve taken your medication and at what time. “We add less than 30 cents a day to the cost of pharmaceuticals but we add lots of information,” Thompson explained.

The conference was leavened with a sprinkling of celebrities. Martha Stewart spoke about an outpatient center for geriatric medicine. Goldie Hawn shared how she came up with a curriculum for schoolchildren that seeks to increase kids’ happiness and optimism. Fashion designer Donna Karan spoke about Urban Zen, a sanctuary she created in New York for patients, their relatives, doctors and nurses.

Laura Ziskin, a movie producer (Spider-Man 3) and a metastatic breast cancer patient, made a passionate plea for everyone to “stand up to cancer.” Her Stand Up 2 Cancer advocacy group raised $100 million and has made grants to groups that promise to have a drug in human testing in three years. Ziskin’s friend and singer Dave Stewart, (formerly of the group the Eurythmics), performed a song he wrote called “Stand Up 2 Cancer.”

Some conference goers were skeptical that the technologies on display will become affordable enough to be widely adopted. “I can’t see Medicaid paying for the wireless sensors,” said an emergency room doctor from the East Coast. But others there see plenty of opportunity to use low-cost technologies to improve medical care and keep people out of the hospital. May the best technologies win.